Tolerating Teenagers

Of all the amazing moments in the fascinating and weighty American Beauty, it’s Lester Burnham’s last words that I recall most often: “Man, oh man. Man, oh man, oh man, oh man.” He’s looking at a photo of his family that seems untouched by the psychosis and pain that’s haunted them throughout the film. They are young, happy, united. His words are at once a meditation on the depraved and surprising nature of humanity, and a simple inability to express one’s feelings about said nature. In this state of transcendent meditation, his life is cut short, and the movie effectively ends. This is its thesis statement.

I feel something similar when I look at my own life, or at least at the period about which I wrote so much in those letters I republished last month. It’s hard to read them, in part, because I see so many failings in them. Failure to see things as they really were: I was foolishly optimistic about the situation there for far too long. Failure to see almost anything beyond myself: I wanted to leave the letters untouched, but couldn’t bring myself not to edit out the most navel-gazingly offensive passages. Failure, above all, to see that what mattered most was very far from what I spent most of my time trying to do.

… Two things inspired me about this experience. The first was the similarity of my seventeen-year-old self with my only-very-slightly-younger students of today. As the age gap between us grows (I am now roughly twice their age) I find it harder and harder to relate to them, and I can be especially unforgiving of shallow self-centeredness. But reading my own entries from that time has reminded me that this is how teenagers are, and I was like that too. So if I don’t rush too quickly to judgment, my own students may follow a similar path to a greater understanding of the world.

I needed to read that today.

You know what I love most about getting older? The gift of perspective. If I had had half as much passion, and only a quarter more perspective, my teenage years and my twenties would have been far more bearable. But some things you only acquire with the passage of time.

In my local cultural community, a number of the kids are in their teens and so their behavior, especially the girls, can sometimes be perplexing (I’m 31 so a little bit removed enough from those years). But I love talking to them moreso than the “adults” because they’re more full of life, tbh, and I’m reminded of those turbulent, high-strung years of my own youth. In some ways, I guess I consider it good training for when I’m a dad someday (iA). Teenagers are crazy. But I was once one of them.

I agree with you, and this is one of the problems with our oh so youth-oriented culture. So much revolves around what the young are doing and thinking and feeling, and they are precisely the ones without adequate perspective. It becomes a vicious circle.

We got a lot of criticism about the way we raised our son, particularly from my mother. She had kittens when I let him get an ear pierced when he was about 9. Here is what I told her.

If I tell him no I will fight with him constantly until he defies me (just like I defied you when I was 14) and presents it as a done deal. Then I’ll have to have an even bigger fight which I will again loose, just like you did. If I take him to a licensed practitioner and get it done safely, I don’t have to fight with anyone and in 6 months he’ll loose the ear-ring, the hole will close & I will never have to deal with it again.

Good thoughts. Passions flare up, and then fade, and then flare up again, sometimes for bizarre or disproportionate reasons, and it causes us to lose our sense of the scale of life. I imagine it happens to people of all ages, too….

Al-Dhariyat, you reminded me of one of my favorite lines ever, from War & Peace:

“No, life is not over at 31,” Prince Andrei decided, finally and irrevocably.

I read that book, not knowing about that line, just a month or two after my 31st birthday, and I just about stood up and cheered!

As the father of three teenage boys, let me rise to the defense of adolescence. It is still possible, albeit it difficult, for teenagers to possess surprisingly deep moral and emotional resources, that can either help them weather great difficulties or that they can channel into the idealist projects that bear fruit in later years. Thank God for teenagers!

There was a wonderful article in National Geographic recently about what is known about the teenage brain. Basically, it’s a story of gross intelligence given a fairly mythological picture of the world and not yet much inhibited or shaped by experience. Like bad philosophy, and with similar results. 😉

I never liked other children when I was a child; I was the sort of child who always got along better with adults. This was also true when I was in the teenage years. I haven’t seen anything in children or teens since then to make me change my mind. But then, I’m 49, and the youngest people I’ve associated with on a regular basis for the past 30 years are college students.

Teenagers are crazy. But I was once one of them.

Maybe that’s the problem. I never really was. I never really rebelled against my parents; I rebelled against my peer group. This was also generally true of my small group of friends at the time.

I also agree with Polinchello about American Beauty. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Don’t get me wrong- the passion and exuberance and idealism of youth are good things, properly channeled. But the overemphasis of our culture on youth, and the desires and preoccupations of youth, come at the expense of those who have the perspective and wisdom of older age, and what they have to offer to the young is marginalized.

Teenagers generally don’t get on my nerves nearly as much as kids who are from about 9-12. Kids that age have no clue whatsoever how life works, but many of them they think they do. Ask them what they’re going to be when they grow up, and you hear a lot of celebrity-type answers. Teenagers, at least the brighter ones, have started to have some sense of realism about their prospects in life creep in.

I never really rebelled against my parents; I rebelled against my peer group. I was the same way. Spent a lot of time alone because of it, but wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

First the waves of fears unseen
Scour away the hopeful dreams
As they unfold
Within the souls
Of the desolate millions

That is the first “stanza” of a “poem” that I wrote when I was fourteen. It ends dramatically:

The men, once tormented, at last seem serene
Reunited in death with their long-dead dreams

I’m cringing and blushing as I type this. But then I remember, I was only fourteen, my sixteen-year-old sister had died just two years before, and I was none too sure about my own survival (I don’t know why; I was healthy, but . . .)–
So, yeah, we should tolerate teenagers, and we should never assume that they don’t know what love and loss are.

Re: American Beauty: For several years running, my parents made a point of going to see every movie nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture in that particular year. After they saw American Beauty, they never made the effort to do that again.

Same here. (Well, I won’t get into that infamous party at Pleasant Lake…) But my parents were hard to rebel against. Dad and step-mom both engaged me as an adult and I had been a fearsomely responsible child since my real mother’s death (OK, forgetting about Pleasant Lake…). But yeah, I really wasn’t much involved with other teens. My friends tended to older than me, and they were generally people I knew from outside of school.
Also, I knew a degree of rapid role reversal in my early 20s as my father’s disability and declining health (he died when I was 24) put me in the role of caregiver.